The phenomenon of local manufacturing: An attempt at a differentiation of Distributed, Re-Distributed and Urban Manufacturing

The unpredictable occurrences of a pandemic and trade conflicts have recently demonstrated the fragility of global, industrial value chains. Local value creation structures have the potential to mitigate these issues by increasing resil- ience and meeting present ecological, economic and social challenges. However, the idea of localizing manufacturing encompasses various concepts of value cre- ation that are often used without clearly differentiating them. This paper presents a meta-synthesis which evaluates study results on the topic of local manufactur- ing aiming to outline Distributed Manufacturing (DM), Re-Distributed Manufac- turing (RDM) and Urban Manufacturing (UM). Key attributes are identified and used to characterize the concepts, also highlighting overlaps and differences be- tween them. This allows for a better understanding of local manufacturing and consolidates multiple descriptions of these concepts, thus enabling a more uni- versal and unambiguous communication when referring to DM, RDM or UM. The PDF File contains a list of the literature used for the meta synthesis.